From the course: Painting Foundations: Creating Palettes for the Landscape

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A compressed tonal range

A compressed tonal range

From the course: Painting Foundations: Creating Palettes for the Landscape

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A compressed tonal range

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When I'm painting landscapes, I'm essentially looking for ranges of lights and darks. And these areas, these ranges of tones can be called tonal masses. And they're really key, because they'll influence how I'm going to approach my color mixing and help to tell the story of that season. They can be called a tonal map or a value map or tonal range. But the main thing to remember throughout the seasons is how wide or compressed that range is as it will influence how light or how dark you can go with your pigments. So summer has a wide tonal range. Winter has a narrow, or a compressed tonal range. And the easiest way to see this is by turning your reference image into black and white. Throughout this course I'll be mixing colors to not only match the hues of the image but also paying close attention to the light and dark range of that season. So in this example from one of our winter scenes, you can see how close in value the sky is to the value of the snow. And it can be misleading to…

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